Blue Planet
Astronomers Spot Water — and Maybe Rain — on a Distant Planet
Detecting liquid water on exoplanets is a big deal since that means they have the ability to harbor life — and the more discoveries we make, the surer we get that we’re not alone in the universe. A...
Best Guess
Astronomers Predict Planet Nine Has 5x the Earth’s Mass
Pluto 2.0 In 2006, the downgrading of Pluto left a planet-sized hole in our hearts. Then, in 2014, astronomers proposed that there could be a mysterious “Planet Nine” that’s never been observed...
Forbidden Steak
We May Be Eating Most Megafauna To Extinction
Mega-steak Those massive animals we know and love, like polar bears, blue whales, and ostriches, may be running out of time on Earth and our insatiable appetite for meat may be part of the problem....
RIP Big Guy
Astronomers Are Watching as a Neptune-Sized Exoplanet Disintegrates
Disintegrating Planet About 800 light years away, a massive exoplanet is having a hard time keeping itself together. And we mean that literally — K2-22b has been crumbling into pieces since before...
Farout
Astronomers Just Found a Dwarf Planet Three Times As Far Away As Pluto
“Far Out!” It’s official: astronomers found a new dwarf planet in our solar system — and it’s the most distant object ever observed in our solar system. “I said ‘far out!’ when I discovered it, and...
Lunar Helper
NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Could Assist Commercial Missions to the Moon
Lunar Helper NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) launched in 2009. And it’s still orbiting the Moon to this very day — almost ten years later. And it still has a decent amount of fuel left in...
Kepler's Day Off
NASA: Kepler Space Telescope is Out of Fuel
R.I.P. Kepler NASA announced Tuesday that Kepler, an orbital telescope that’s been spotting and analyzing distant planets for the past nine years, has run out of fuel and will no longer carry out...
Time to Shine, CI Tau
These New Planets Are Massive. So Is What They Could Teach Us.
A Star Is Born* *Two billion years ago. But still: the star CI Tau is small and young, comparatively speaking. It’s about 80 percent the size of our own Sun and less than half its age. But the...
Roll Out
This Weird Robot Has 32 Legs and Is Shaped Like a Lumpy Sphere
See Me Rollin’ We’ve seen robots that hop on one leg, saunter like bipedal humans, and mimic our quadrupedal furry friends But a bot with 32 legs? That’s something we hadn’t seen before. Now here’s...
Earth & Energy
No Existing Policies Will Be Enough To Prevent A Future “Hothouse Earth”
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE. Right now, the Paris Agreement is probably humanity’s best shot of reducing the catastrophic effects of climate change. One hundred seventy nine nations have committed to...